4:48 PM, May 29, 2013

Detroit Free Press Lansing Bureau

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MACKINAC ISLAND — It was a speech that hit many of the right notes for a potential Republican presidential candidate.

Kicking off the Mackinac Policy Conference Wednesday, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush talked about the need for education reform, free of the constraints imposed by teachers unions.

“We must give parents a choice on where they send their kids to school,” Bush said. “Critics will say that the Educational Achievement Authorities are unproven experiments. But what has consistently failed are schools that continue to fail students year after year.

“We embrace school choice across the board,” he said.

He also praised Gov. Rick Snyder for appointing an emergency manager for Detroit, calling the city “a looming fiscal calamity,” that makes it hard for businesses to move to the city.

He heralded Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker for taking on public sector unions, and Snyder for signing right to work laws last year that dealt a serious blow to organized labor.

“He wasn’t reading the polls when he signed right to work into law,” Bush said. “He knew the payoff would come over the long haul.”

But he diverged from many Republicans when he talked about Common Core standards for education, which the Republican-led majority in the state Legislature refused to fund in the 2013-budget.

“Common Core state standards are clear and straightforward,” he said. “Do not pull back from these high lofty standards.”

Common core is a set of educational standards developed by the National Governors Association and adopted by the Michigan Board of Education in 2010. It is an effort to standardize educational achievement goals nationwide, but is completely voluntary.

Because the administration of President Barack Obama has tied some educational grant money to the Common Core standards, some critics have called it an overreach by the federal government into local education.

That happened in Michigan this week when the Legislature inserted language in the Department of Education budget that prohibits the department from spending any money to implement the Common Core standards.

Both Snyder and Bush said they were talking with legislators about the benefits of Common Core.

“We really need to get the facts out of what Common Core is all about,” Snyder said. “It’s an initiative by governors to make us competitive on a global basis. The federal government has nothing to do with common core. We need to clarify that.”

As for the 2016 presidential sweepstakes, Bush said he’s not going to decide for 12-15 months if he’ll run.

“It’s a hard decision. It’s about family and whether I have the right stuff to run,” he said, adding his mother Barbara Bush complicated the issue a bit when she recently said that America doesn’t need another Bush in the White House.

“What can I tell you. We all have mothers,” he said. “When moms get to that age, that little regulator that most people have — she didn’t have one to begin with. She is totally liberated and God Bless her.”